


Who Wants to Live Forever

by ExpressAndAdmirable



Series: The Heroes of Light [14]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types, Final Fantasy I
Genre: Backstory, Bards Being Bards, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentor/Protégé, Racism, Tiefling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 03:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13158789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpressAndAdmirable/pseuds/ExpressAndAdmirable
Summary: Aviva attempts to process the death of her mentor and is interrupted by his distraught husband.





	Who Wants to Live Forever

She knew Mourat was old. In fact, she had never known Mourat to be anything other than old. As a girl, she had even wondered if he had always been old. He had a way about him that made him seem timeless, frozen, as if he had always existed and would always exist in the same suspended state of oldness. But time was cruel and constant, and so, it seemed, was death.

Aviva unlocked the door and quietly let herself into the darkened shop. She vaguely considered lighting a candle or a lantern, but instead removed an oud from the pile of instruments in the window to allow a few shafts of sunlight to peer through. He would have preferred it.

For a time she simply stood, the oud hanging from her hand like a dead game fowl. Motes of dust floated through the thin strips of sun, contrasting with the utter stillness and silence of the shop. Everything sat in its place, every instrument, supply and scrap of paper arranged in a complex system that had only fully made sense to one man. It looked just the same as any other day.

By the gods, she needed a smoke.

With her free hand she produced a small cedar box from a pouch at her belt and contemplated the cigarettes inside. Mourat had heartily and vocally disapproved when she had started smoking, despite his own fondness for the sweetness of pipe tobacco, even going so far as to forbid her from smoking inside. She had protested, as her chosen mixture was not half as noxious as others, but he had insisted. She petulantly reminded herself that he wasn’t there to scold her, but the thought stopped her cold. She put the box back in its pouch.

The oud needed a home that wasn’t the window. Aviva scanned the shop, trying once again to discern Mourat’s master plan for organisation, if even there truly was one. Ten years it had been her second home and still she knew so little. Perhaps it could live on some of the open pegs near the violas on the wall, though its body might be too long for that area. Her eyes darted to the oud itself to judge its size and she noticed the tuning pegs were loose. That would not do.

Retrieving a stool from beneath the keys of the old harpsichord in the corner, she sat, setting the oud in her lap and plucking at the strings as she turned the pegs. Once each one had achieved its proper pitch, she strummed aimlessly, half-formed melodies coming and going. Her mind wandered.

At six, she had come under the old man’s tutelage, still raw and reeling from the loss of her father. At ten, she had manifested her first magic, channelled through song and biting word. At twelve, she had played her first public performance on a street corner near the Academy. At thirteen, she had started to use her surname when asked who she was and where she had come from, a decision Mourat had helped her make. By fifteen, she and Mourat had developed a persona around the name Lux, a glittering feylike creature who was water and fire, fluid and passionate. And now, at sixteen, she was lost once again. Mourat had given her direction, focus, purpose. He had shown her music, encouraged her to wrap herself in it, to use it as solace and protection. But for all his wisdom and all his teachings, he had never told her how to continue on without him.

“So.”

With a start, Aviva looked up, her fingers jumping away from the strings. An old man in the dark robes of mourning stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the morning sun. A Human. His gaunt face was pale, his eyes unkind. He wore no expression.

“You’re the stray my husband took in.”

Suddenly feeling six years old again, Aviva held the oud slightly closer to her chest, an unconscious shield. “You must be Thomas,” she started slowly, moving to stand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet–”

Thomas waved his hand sharply as he stepped inside, cutting her off. “I did not agree with his decision to train one of your kind. I discouraged him whenever I could. You’re bad luck, you all are. But he insisted. He was fond of you, he said. He thought of you as his protegee. Imagine,” he scoffed, fixing her with a cold stare. “He shared something as divine to him as the gods themselves with one born of the greatest blasphemy. And he paid dearly for it.”

Aviva blinked, opened her mouth, closed it again. It took her several long, incredulous moments to find her voice. “I… I am not what you think of me, sir. I did nothing to harm Mourat, I could never. He showed me kindness when no other would. He meant the world to me; I loved him as I would my own grandfather.”

“Do not presume to tell me of love!” Thomas hissed as his hands balled into fists. “ _Your_ kind is not capable of it. You can dress a dog in silk, you can teach it to dance and please its master, but it’s still nothing but a dog.” He made a shape with his hand that Aviva knew well: a protection against evil. Against her. “His caring for you shortened his life, I’m sure of it. He had such spirit! We could have had many more years together, good years, _happy_ years, but he threw them away to devote his time to _you_.” Thomas’s voice cracked, his eyes welling up with furious tears. He was in pain. He had lost someone he loved. He was looking for someone to blame.

A cold, stoic calm came over Aviva. She had weathered such abuses before and well knew how to divorce herself from them. She knew the steps of this dance. It was clear this old man had already made up his mind. She straightened her back but did not rise from the stool. “What will happen to the shop?”

Thomas glared at her. “It won’t go to you, if that’s what you’re hoping. I’ll sell off the pieces and shut it down. There’s nothing left for us here.”

With a curt nod, Aviva stood. “I won’t keep you, then.” She began to move brusquely about the shop, gathering a variety of instruments. The oud, a bouzouki, a small hand drum, several extra bows and packages of rosin and spare strings. Anything she might need. She arranged them atop the harpsichord and added up the costs in her head, her fingers fluttering in the air as she calculated. “I’ll take these off your hands.” She pulled her coin purse out of her pouch and, without counting, tossed it onto the harpsichord’s wooden lid. It landed with a thud that sent a dull, funereal echo through the body of the instrument. She knew there would be enough coin to cover her costs, even without the reduction in pricing Mourat would have given her. There was no point in further reminding Thomas of her favoured treatment.

Never slowing her businesslike pace, Aviva placed the smaller items delicately into a ratty canvas bag and swung the strap of the bouzouki over her shoulder. Grasping the neck of the oud, she breezed past the old man, who flinched instinctively and made another warding gesture. He was a full head shorter than she, and in that moment, he seemed infinitely small.

She paused in the doorway and turned to look Thomas in the eye. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then she left.

Aviva had no interest in taking the main roads today. She kept to back alleys and side streets, avoiding the city’s other citizens as best she could. Her bones and muscles knew where to go when she needed to be alone. She walked mindlessly, deliberately, and it was not until she stopped to light a cigarette that she discovered she was shaking. She had been shaking since she stepped out of the shop. She couldn’t stop shaking.

As she went to slide her cigarette box back into its pouch, she discovered something else: she had forgotten, or it had not occurred to her, to return her shop key. She stared at it, turning it over in her palm as if she had never seen such a shape before. The key to a place she was no longer welcome, owned by a man who no longer existed. A memento mori. She considered getting rid of it, dropping it in the gutter or throwing it into the sea, but something inside her made her hold it tight. It was _hers_. It was hers and it would always be hers, just as the knowledge and the training and the memories would always be hers. She slipped the key back into her pouch.

Mourat would have liked that.

**Author's Note:**

> Title song by Queen.
> 
> Follow me on Tumblr at @expressandadmirable for a proper table of contents for the Heroes campaign, commissioned character art, text-based roleplay snippets and more!


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